The Mystery of Continuing Democratic Support for Offensive Arms to Israel

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-08-05-mystery-of-continuing-democratic-support-offensive-arms-israel/



Even though few of Gaza’s buildings remain standing, even though Gazans continue to starve, Bibi Netanyahu has decided his work is not yet done. Officials in his office have told Israeli reporters that he is considering a new offensive that will send Israeli troops into the few remaining areas of Gaza not yet attacked. Those are the areas in which the 20 remaining Israeli hostages are held, and what’s left of Hamas has made clear that if their hostage-holders come under attack, they’ll kill the remaining hostages.

Israeli opposition to this unending war has now reached its highest levels. Israelis had become accustomed to relatively short wars before this one; that’s the only kind of war a small nation can wage without major disruptions to its economy and daily life. As Israeli military and intelligence officials say that Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian nuclear threat have all been crippled, the war’s sole remaining raison d’être is Bibi’s determination to keep two overtly racist, far-right parties in his coalition lest his government fall apart, prompting new elections and a possible jail sentence should he be convicted of having accepted bribes. Actually, that’s been the war’s raison d’être for some time now—only now, all the ostensible raisons d’être have been dispelled.

Which raises the question of why 17 Democratic senators last week voted against two resolutions authored by Bernie Sanders that would have halted the sale of offensive weapons to Israel. One resolution called for a halt to sales of offensive weapons only, so that, for instance, the sale of the kind of anti-missile weapons that make up Israel’s “Golden Dome” could still go forward. The other resolution called for a halt to the sale of tens of thousands of fully automatic assault rifles, now used by government forces in the West Bank, under the command of racist extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir, to attack and dispossess the Palestinians who live there.

Sanders has previously put such resolutions before the Senate as the Gaza War has bloodily dragged on, but this marked the first time that a majority of Democratic senators—27—had voted for one or both. (Twelve of those 27 had opposed similar versions of those resolutions when they came before the Senate in April.) Yet despite the fact that such weapons sales will only contribute to the continuing destruction of Gaza and seizure of the West Bank, despite the fact that these resolutions came up for a vote at a time when Israel’s policy of inflicting mass starvation on Palestinians was still proceeding, 17 Democratic senators still joined every Republican in voting no on both. They were Colorado’s Bennet and Hickenlooper, Connecticut’s Blumenthal, New Jersey’s Booker, Washington’s Cantwell, Delaware’s Coons, Nevada’s Cortez Masto and Rosen, Pennsylvania’s Fetterman, New York’s Gillibrand and Schumer, New Hampshire’s Hassan, California’s Padilla and Schiff, Michigan’s Peters, Virginia’s Warner, and Oregon’s Wyden.

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